Cavity Wall Insulation: Wales

Hywel Williams Excerpts

Wednesday 19th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Hywel Williams (Arfon) (PC)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered cavity wall insulation in Wales.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Nuttall—I think for the first time—and to lead a debate on this issue. Unfortunately, after many years of campaigning, lobbying and debates, it is still unresolved.

Many of my constituents had cavity wall insulation installed, having been persuaded—in fact, I would use the phrase “deceived by omission”—that it was suitable for their homes and for local weather conditions. How wrong they were. Many have found that out to their cost, as they have suffered damp and damage, stress, threats to health and ever-present black walls.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The whole of Wales and indeed much of the UK’s western seaboard is categorised as having very severe exposure to wind-driven rain. Does my hon. Friend agree that the Building Research Establishment maps that point that out should have been widely publicised by the Government so that people could assess whether cavity walling was appropriate in their area?

[Hywel Williams]

That is certainly the case. It is an elementary step. One just needs to look at the map of the UK. The west of Wales, the south-west of England, the north-west of England and Scotland are all coloured a deep blue, and areas such as East Anglia are coloured white. A five-year-old could look at that map and see where the rain was going to be and where there might be problems. Unfortunately, many people were not aware of those maps or of this issue.

The consumer redress process so far has been unsatisfactory. Vulnerable people have been left in damp and damaged homes. The industry guarantee scheme has failed many victims and has shortcomings, including sometimes—I am sorry to say this—a hostile attitude to victims. There is an opportunity for the Government to put things right, and my demand—I put it as strongly as that—today is for the Minister to take decisive action to protect consumers from further bad practice, identify all victims and fully compensate all those who have been affected by what is clearly a Government-backed scheme.

[Stephen Doughty (Cardiff South and Penarth) (Lab/Co-op)]

I wholeheartedly agree with the hon. Gentleman’s comments. I, too, have constituents who have been terribly affected. In one case, an elderly couple had cavity wall insulation installed 10 years ago by Domestic and General, which subsequently went into liquidation, and they have had the shambolic experience of dealing with the Cavity Insulation Guarantee Agency—particularly its head of customer service—and all sorts of other agencies. It has just become one shambles after another, and they have not had redress.

[Hywel Williams]

I am afraid that the picture the hon. Gentleman paints is all too common, especially in Wales but also in parts of the north-west of England. For example, people from Blackpool have travelled all the way to Bangor and Caernarfon to see me to explain the difficulties that they have had in areas where cavity wall insulation has been installed without explanation and there is wind-driven rain, which is the danger.

I welcome the long-awaited report of the Bonfield review entitled “Each Home Counts”, which was released on 16 December last year; some hon. Members may have seen it. A review was first considered by the then Under-Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, the right hon. Member for Hastings and Rye (Amber Rudd), on 3 February 2015, during the second debate we had on the issue. I spoke in that debate and expressed my concern about the attitude towards victims of cavity wall insulation of some in the insulation industry and the official bodies that allowed this to happen.

[Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Gentleman speaks about this issue with great authority and passion for his constituents and people across the UK. My constituent Sarah Morgan recently discovered that she had two different CIGA guarantees for her property—one with a clause detailing the homeowner’s responsibility for property maintenance and one without. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that that subtle change is being used by CIGA as nothing more than a get-out clause?

[Hywel Williams]

Perhaps the hon. Gentleman is blessed with clairvoyance, because I was going to raise that matter. It is extraordinary that the maintenance clause is in the small print, as I understand it, and then suddenly reappears in the rather fancy guarantee as a separate and prominent item of its own. I should imagine that had people—especially older and perhaps disabled people—been aware that they had to maintain the house to a high standard, a lot of them would not have gone in for cavity wall insulation in the first place. That has certainly been my experience with the many cases that I have come across.

This matter has been raised on numerous occasions by cross-party alliances, supported by the tireless work of the victims’ support group, the Cavity Insulation Victims Alliance. I am glad to have this opportunity to commend CIVALLI’s work, which it does with virtually no resources. It communicates the distress of consumers who reach out to it, dismayed at the effects of cavity wall insulation, the process through which it was sold and installed, and the attitudes of bodies that were set up to protect them. Its efforts have resulted in this matter being brought to the forefront of the political agenda, a “better late than never” review and some positive steps.

As CIVALLI and I rather expected having met Paul Bonfield, the review focuses on recommendations for future cavity wall insulation but does not place responsibility or blame for redress or provide compensation for those who have been disadvantaged. The review is forward looking, and quite reasonably so, but our concern is with the large number of historical cases.

The review underlines some positive progress. The British Board of Agrément and CIGA have launched a scheme whereby property assessments are independently reviewed for compliance with industry specifications to ensure that cavity wall insulation installations are carried out only on suitable properties. It strikes me, though, that the review’s publication and the progress made so far is much too little, much too late. I might say that the Titanic, alas, is already going down.

My concern is about the millions of homes already treated with cavity wall insulation, a proportion of which are problematic. I do not know what that proportion is, and it seems that no one else does either, for that matter. We do not know how many there are or where they are, but it is clear that cavity wall insulation has been installed in properties unsuitable due to their location, the size of the cavity, the state of external walls, rendering or pointing.

My constituency, Arfon, is in the category 4 area; in fact, much of west Wales is category 4, as my hon. Friend the Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts) noted. When I raised this issue with the then Under-Secretary in the debate in February 2015 and asked her whether cavity wall insulation should have been installed in these areas, her response was:

“My recollection is that mostly it should not have been.”—[Official Report, 3 February 2015; Vol. 592, c. 20WH.]

That is as clear as can be: it should not have been put in, but it was. Installers, CIGA, manufacturers of cavity wall insulation, Governments and everyone seemed to claim that insulations were preceded by a full assessment of the suitability of the property. I am yet to see an assessment report, and seriously wonder whether such reports exist in any real sense.

In my experience, installers failed to take customer complaints seriously and to provide adequate redress. There seems to be a culture of avoiding customer queries, not responding at all, failing to provide full answers to straightforward questions and denying liability. I have heard people say so many times that they were told that it was just condensation—“Open a window and let all that expensive heat out; we’ll sell you some more”, presumably.

Extraction of failed cavity wall insulation is only one element, and most customers will not be offered even that. In my opinion, customers should also be able to recover costs for interior and exterior damage due to the poor installation and extraction, plus compensation for the distress caused. When I have talked to CIGA, it has said—quite reasonably, I think—that it is a guarantee scheme, not a compensation scheme. However, people have suffered, and they deserve compensation.

Many people complain that they signed up for cavity wall insulation only because they were explicitly told that it was a Government-backed scheme, and they feel that the Government should take responsibility for putting things right. In fact, I have seen a sales video that, after about eight minutes of hard sell, has a prominent TV personality saying clearly that it is a Government scheme. Now, he is a salesman and a television personality, but people took him at his word.

We know that CIGA proffered a 25-year guarantee but, again, that guarantee was worth little to most people after it became clear that there was not a suitable system of quality assurance for installers. Indeed, that was a matter I took up with the previous Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Hywel Williams]

I was talking about the guarantee and the fact that a clause in the small print has now been amplified to the main document. My friends in CIVALLI have told me that, on one property, there are two guarantees, two versions of the same guarantee—one with and one without that clause. It seems to me that CIGA sometimes uses the maintenance condition as a get-out clause. If people had been properly aware of the stringent maintenance rule, many of them would not have risked having CWI. The guarantee is pointless if the maintenance is unaffordable. Many of the people who put this material in are older, disabled or on low incomes; in fact, in Wales 25% of people are living in fuel poverty. Those people will not be up a ladder making sure that the rendering under the roof is proofed against wind-driven rain. The fact is that people in deprived areas were targeted, because they were keen to take part in the scheme and save money on their heat.

Many of the companies that carried out the installations are now defunct. Through recent correspondence with the British Board of Agrément, I have been notified that provisions have been put in place to help consumers where cavity wall insulation has been abandoned, for either company liquidation or inadequacy reasons. I think that is to be respected, but I am worried about this matter more generally.

I am worried that CIGA is under-resourced, hence the resistance to addressing remedial damage and to funding extraction properly. It is adamant that installers should assume liability, but in my constituents’ experience, that often proves impossible, especially given that so many of the companies have gone into liquidation—they were something of a fly-by-night set of organisations. That is resulting in a pattern of CIGA offering to extract from one wall only, which is against expert guidelines and will lead to other problems.

My constituent Alwyn Williams has been battling for three years with this problem. The original installers went bust. CIGA refused to help and refused all liability for two years, on the basis of the poor maintenance clause. It has now offered to extract from one wall. I have spoken to several experts in the field of extraction, including Andrew Quayle of Titan Insulation and Damian Mercer of Cavity Extraction Ltd, who tell me that extracting from one wall creates a cold spot and is likely to severely worsen the problem in the long term.

CIGA does offer an alternative dispute resolution, which I am glad of, and CIVALLI offers support and advice. There is, however, a yawning power gap between the two sides here. Of course, victims require an independent private survey, which can cost around £300; otherwise, there is not a lot of chance of them winning their case. Due to the sheer number of failed CWI installations, the extraction industry is now booming, and I fear we are putting ourselves in line for a further scandal, as extractions are carried out but not properly inspected.

My speech today has been on many of the industry’s failings, but as I said earlier, this is a Government-inspired scheme. Successive Governments have advocated unpoliced and unregulated cavity wall insulation schemes in the race to secure carbon reduction targets—energy companies are being fined by Ofgem for not reaching those targets. That is all at the expense of the quality of life of the victims; their lives have been ruined.

At the very least, the UK Government should have the answer to the following questions. How many people have suffered at the hands of this particular scheme? I have heard estimates of 1% or 2%, but given that there are millions of installations, that is a large number of people. Who are the people who have been affected? Where do they live? I think they live on the west side of Britain. How will their problems be rectified? The big question is, who is going to pay for all this? To be fair to CIGA, it is under-resourced. It depends on its guarantee income, which surely will not be sufficient.

I will end by saying that, in the debate in 2015, the then Minister, who is now the Home Secretary, said that an election was due and she would leave the file open on her desk for her successor. We now have an election due again, and I hope the Minister is not going to sign off by saying that the file will be left open. We really do need some action as soon as possible on what I can only describe as an emerging scandal.